The term “search engine” is generally meant to refer to a server or a collection of servers dedicated to indexing Internet web pages, storing the results and returning lists of pages that match particular queries (e.g., key word queries). A server is a computer, program or process that responds to requests for information from a client. On the Internet, all web pages are held on servers. This includes those parts of the search engines and directories that are accessible from the Internet. The indexes themselves are normally generated using spiders. A spider is that part of a search engine that surfs the web, storing the universal resource locators (URLs, i.e., the web addresses) and indexing the keywords and text of each page it finds. At present, some of the major search engines are Altavista™, Excite™, Hotbot™, Infoseek™, Lycos™, Northern Light™ and Webcrawler™. Note that the popular site Yahoo™ is technically a directory (a server or a collection of servers dedicated to indexing Internet web pages and returning lists of pages which match particular queries—directories, also known as indexes, are normally compiled manually, by user submission, and often involve an editorial selection and/or categorization process), not a search engine. The term search engine is nevertheless often used to describe both directories and search engines.
Generally, search engines return results based on key words or search strings that are supplied by users. Results are typically found by matching the key words or search strings with metatags present in the hypertext markup language (HTML) used to encode the web pages of the target web sites. Results are also often ranked according to the quality of the match between the-metatags and the search strings. Depending upon the search algorithms employed by the search engine, the more frequently a terms is used as a metatag, the more likely it is to be assigned a high ranking in the returned results. Owners of web sites therefore often repeat metatag terms numerous times (often using common spelling variations and similar terms) so as to ensure that their respective web sites will gain a high ranking when an Internet user executes a search. While this is beneficial for the web site owner (as it is likely an Internet user will tend to select highly ranked results of a search), it is not necessarily beneficial for the user, who may be mislead into selecting a less than desirable web site by such tactics.